Site Mobile Navigation

Obama Is an Avid Reader, and Critic, of the News

President Obama on the White House grounds with an iPad, which he uses often for news.Credit
Joshua Roberts/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — A few months after President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package passed, he began to notice news reports, but not about the jobs the bill might create or how much of the country’s infrastructure it would repair. Instead, the articles focused on traffic jams.

“Traffic Set to Slow as Stimulus Gears Up,” as the headline on a 2009 article in USA Today read.

Jared Bernstein, an economist in the administration at the time, said the articles exemplified the White House’s problems with news media coverage. “The feeling was, ‘man, we can’t catch a break,’ ” he said.

While former President George W. Bush and his aides liked to say they ignored the Fourth Estate, Mr. Obama is an avid consumer of political news and commentary. But in his informal role as news media critic in chief, he developed a detailed critique of modern news coverage that he regularly expresses to those around him.

The news media have played a crucial role in Mr. Obama’s career, helping to make him a national star not long after he had been an anonymous state legislator. As president, however, he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.

Privately and publicly, Mr. Obama has articulated what he sees as two overarching problems: coverage that focuses on political winners and losers rather than substance; and a “false balance,” in which two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts.

Mr. Obama’s assessments overlap with common critiques from academics and journalism pundits, but when coming from a sitting president the appraisal is hardly objective, the experts say.

“I think we’ve learned through history to beware of presidents playing press critic,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “They’re not press critics — they’re people trying to advance a political agenda.”

A writer before he was a politician, Mr. Obama is a voracious consumer of news, reading newspapers and magazines on his iPad and in print and dipping into blogs and Twitter. He regularly gives aides detailed descriptions of articles that he liked, and he can be thin-skinned about those that he does not.

He typically begins his day upstairs in the White House reading the major newspapers, including his hometown Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, mostly on his iPad through apps rather than their Web sites. He also skims articles that aides e-mail to him, with the subject line stating the publication and the headline (like “WSJ: Moody’s Downgrades Banks”).

During the day, Mr. Obama reads newspapers on his iPad and print copies of magazines like The Economist and The New Yorker. On most Air Force One flights, he catches up on the news on his iPad.

But Mr. Obama has used new media to his advantage. He has hosted Twitter “town hall” sessions at the White House, a Google “hangout” and a discussion via LinkedIn. In May, Mr. Obama announced with 30 minutes advance notice that he would answer questions on Twitter, a move that rattled the White House press corps. “Today’s #WHChat was announced hours ago,” deputy press secretary Josh Earnest wrote on Twitter. “POTUS answering q’s was last-minute surprise.”

In dealing directly with the news media, Mr. Obama prefers small sit-downs with columnists, including The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne and Ruth Marcus, and The New York Times’s David Brooks, among others, and beat reporters specializing in economics or foreign policy, to political reporters whose coverage he often considers frivolous, said a White House official not authorized to discuss the president’s media preferences for attribution. “After you run a two-year presidential campaign, you’re ready to sit down and have a long conversation about China,” one longtime Obama aide said.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In addition to well-known columnists, Mr. Obama also holds summit meetings with niche online outlets that did not have access, or did not exist, during previous administrations, including personal finance Web sites like The Consumerist and Fool.com, and African-American Web sites like Jack & Jill Politics, The Root and theGrio.

That approach can frustrate White House reporters whose job is to cover the president’s day-to-day activities. It has also hurt the White House’s messaging efforts, said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative magazine and Web site. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all better “understood that the campaign didn’t end and that public perception was vitally important to governing,” Mr. Ruddy said.

Mr. Obama has said the lack of an effective narrative has been one of his administration’s biggest missteps. “The mistake of my first term — couple of years — was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” Mr. Obama said in an interview last month with CBS’s Charlie Rose. “But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people.”

While Mr. Obama frequently criticizes the heated speech of cable news, he sees what he views as deeper problems in news outlets that strive for objectivity. In private meetings with columnists, he has talked about the concept of “false balance” — that reporters should not give equal weight to both sides of an argument when one side is factually incorrect. He frequently cites the coverage of health care and the stimulus package as examples, according to aides familiar with the meetings.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, was previously Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief. He said the president thought that some journalists were more comfortable blaming both parties, regardless of the facts. “To be saying ‘they’re both equally wrong’ or ‘they’re both equally bad,’ ” Mr. Carney said, “then you look high-minded.”

The term “false balance,” which has been embraced by many Democrats, emerged in academic papers in the 1990s to describe global-warming coverage.

“I believe this type of ‘accuracy’ and ‘balance’ are a huge thing afflicting contemporary media,” said Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of the left-leaning Web site Talking Points Memo.

Conservative pundits see things differently. “Obama is used to the press cheerleading for him so any time a story gets reported straight he’s likely to think it represents a false equivalency,” said John H. Hinderaker, a Minneapolis lawyer behind Power Line, a conservative political Web site.

Many journalism experts, for their part, agree that the news media sometimes struggle to distinguish fact from claim, even if Mr. Obama’s version of the critique always paints his administration in a good light.

“I think sometimes we in the media — particularly under the crunch of deadlines — don’t have time to work through all the issues of discerning what is fact,” said Paul E. Steiger, chief executive of ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization, and a former Wall Street Journal managing editor, “and so we say ‘he said, she said.’ ”

Mr. Obama has, on occasion, acknowledged that he is not exactly an unbiased news media critic. “You will cover every word that we say, and we will complain vociferously about the unflattering words that you write,” Mr. Obama said at an Associated Press luncheon in April. “Unless, of course, you’re writing about the other guy — in which case, good job.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 8, 2012, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Is an Avid Reader, and Critic, of the News. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe